The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  The words were: “Submit the password. If your body completes its cycle before the drives are shut down, you perish.”

  Phaethon wondered why the noetic reader did not simply pick the password out of his memory.

  “The password we read from your memory is not valid.”

  Phaethon truly wished he could have somehow not thought the next thought which leaped into his mind. Because that thought was this: If his password was invalid, then someone had overridden it. The only one who could possibly have an override to Phaethon’s authority over this ship, the only person who could convince the ship to ignore Neoptolemous’s legal ownership, was Atkins. During the period Phaethon had erased from his memory, Phaethon must have given Atkins an override.

  Which meant Atkins was aboard the ship.

  “Where?”

  Phaethon did not remember.

  Atkins must have planned to do the same thing he did with the enemy hidden in Daphne’s horse. Namely, to allow the enemy to defeat and kill Phaethon, and watch to see what they did with the spoils of victory.

  “You think we are defeated? Your conclusion that Atkins, wherever he is hiding, will simply be able to destroy me is unwarranted. Why hasn’t he shown himself?”

  Obviously, because the Silent One had not yet done whatever it was he had come here to do. Atkins was waiting for the enemy to reveal his real plans.

  “I have told you all my plans. You still do not believe that I act in good faith? You are a fool! But I still need you to save my people. Tell me the password; otherwise you die; I die; and even Atkins, if he is aboard, is carried away out of your Solar System at twenty-five gravities, aboard a ship that no one can stop and no one can board.”

  But Phaethon did not remember the password.

  “Open your memory caskets.”

  The Silent One was able to manipulate at least some of the functions in Phaethon’s sense filter: A memory casket seemed to appear on the symbol table next to him.

  “If Atkins is aboard, as you believe he is, and you think he is ready to destroy me once I show my real goals, as obviously you do, then not only does it not matter if I gain access to the ship-mind—the real ship-mind this time, not the dummy with which you deceived me before—it actually aids your cause, doesn’t it?”

  The problem with dealing with an enemy who was reading one’s mind was that bluff, deceit, or delay was impossible. The Silent One knew that Phaethon thought Atkins was aboard and waiting. But the Silent One simply did not believe Phaethon’s beliefs were correct.

  Of course, Phaethon had no notion of what was going on inside of the Silent One’s mind.

  “I wish you did. If there were a way I could make this noetic reader able to decode my thoughts, I would use it; then you would see that I am not your enemy; that I am, ultimately, the only true friend you have, Phaethon.”

  Very well. Phaethon would open the first memory casket, looking for a password, and turn the ship over to the Silent One. If the Silent One was sincere, and if he truly intended no harm to the Golden Oecumene, Atkins would no doubt let him live. If not, the Silent One would no doubt perish. Much as he disliked the man, Phaethon had no doubt whatsoever that Atkins could kill any living creature he was permitted to kill, once he was unleashed.

  “You have an almost religious faith in your war god, don’t you, Phaethon? But I see you have decided.”

  With an imaginary hand (Phaethon could not have moved his real one), Phaethon opened the memory casket.

  There was a second casket inside the first. There was an image of a thought card in the lid of this second casket, inscribed with the sign of a winged sword. When he saw it, he began to remember. . . .

  The password was the first thing that returned to his memory: Laocoön. What a strange choice for a password. It was the name of one of the L5 asteroid cities at Trailing Trojan, a place of no particular military significance. There was also some sort of classical allusion to that name, some mythical figure, but Phaethon could not bring it to mind at the moment.

  He sent the password into the menu: the menu winked out, and a rush of numbers, figures, and ideograms flashed across the surfaces of the energy mirrors lining the bridge. The Silent One was taking control of the ship’s mind for the second time. Perhaps this task was occupying the Silent One’s full attention.

  Several of the bridge mannequins looked up at the rush of information on the mirrors, looks of simulated surprise on their simulated features. Sloppy Rufus barked and scrambled up to an upper balcony near the major communication nexus.

  Phaethon realized, with a sensation of shock, that no external observer could have known just what had passed between Phaethon and the Silent One. How could anyone or anything be able to tell Phaethon’s armor had been taken over by the enemy? His armor was opaque to every radiation or probe; no one could tell, from the outside, that its control mind had been subverted. Unless Atkins had eavesdroppers planted inside the noetic unit, or placed along the beam path leading from Phaethon to the Silent One’s brain, it would look simply as if orders were coming from Phaethon’s armor and feeding into the bridge thought boxes.

  Other memories from the casket were crowding into Phaethon’s brain, confused, tangled. As always, memory shock made him feel sleepy. But he was sure they were memories he did not want the Silent One to see.

  He fought. He tried to stay confused, to not recall.

  It was no use. Phaethon remembered that Atkins did not have any such eavesdroppers. He was hooked into the microscopic stealth remotes, and that was all. Phaethon remembered that they had discussed this: and Atkins, being a military man, had wanted to stick with the traditional hardware and software with which he was familiar. He was relying on that one system to tell him his information.

  A system they had decided to have Phaethon run through his armor, because there was no other complex-mind hierarchy aboard the ship . . .

  And now that that system was compromised, Atkins was blind. He was standing right next to Phaethon, and did not know anything was wrong.

  Phaethon lunged out with an imaginary hand. But he was far too slow, and his thoughts betrayed him. The thoughtspace vanished, shut off from an outside source. Without his emergency backup personality available, Phaethon’s brain operated at biochemical speeds, whereas the Silent One, inside the body of a Cold Duke, had the superconductive, high-speed, shape-changing neurocircuits at his command.

  He had reached with his imaginary hand for some control, some way to send a signal and give a warning to Atkins. Because he remembered where Atkins was.

  Phaethon tried to scream out a warning, tried to move. The acceleration was dropping; the Silent One was cutting power to the drive; but Phaethon’s body had not yet thawed, and even if it had, no noise would have penetrated his armor, no shout could have left his helmet any more than it could have left a sealed, airtight, long-buried tomb.

  Atkins was inside Ulysses.

  He was not here inside of his biological body; he had never physically been here. Instead, Atkins’s armor, launched from Earth from the only military spaceport in existence (it was in a large field behind Atkins’s cottage), had carried a downloaded copy of Atkins’s mind and memory. With the portable noetic reader, Phaethon had transferred the download into the mannequin’s brain system, and Atkins had woken up.

  There was a blur of motion, a flare of light. Phaethon was jerked headlong.

  Whatever system the Silent One was using to prevent Phaethon from activating his emergency persona did not prevent Phaethon from activating his rather complex sensory apparatus. Phaethon’s senses were acute enough to see the battle.

  In the first microsecond, the Silent One used a switch in Phaethon’s armor to redirect the aiming beams from the energy mirrors away from their targets in Xenophon’s body and focus them at the Ulysses body. Atkins must have detected this: the Ulysses body started forward as quickly as it could under the twenty-five gravities of acceleration; weapons made of pseudo-matter, one after another,
appeared and disappeared in Ulysses’s hands, all in a matter of several nanoseconds, all firing.

  Xenophon’s body disappeared in a blaze of fire; cut, stabbed, burnt, exploded, vaporized. This explosion took place over the next two microseconds and lasted throughout the remainder of the battle. The overpressure reached a million atmospheres during the explosion itself.

  Phaethon was able to detect, during the second microsecond of combat, Xenophon, beaming his brain information out of his burning body into the other empty Neptunian bodies in the bridge. Neptunian bodies were specially designed to permit such high-speed transfers. Several of Atkins’s weapons laid down a suppressing fire of jamming signals, thought-seeking micropulses, and webs of force to destroy any noumenal information in motion; Xenophon was killed several times, but redundant backups allowed full copies of his brain information to appear at several points around the room. Atkins’s weapons were not programmed to notice that irrational mathematics code was thought information; it looked like gibberish to their circuits; they did not know what type of pattern of forces would block transmissions.

  At about this same time, the fire from the mirrors struck Ulysses’s body. The rags of his costume were blown off as the air around ignited. Beneath, however, was the black armor of Atkins, empty except for Atkins’s mind, absorbing the firepower, shredding concentric layers of ablative, releasing fogs of nanomaterial around him.

  The armor propelled itself forward with unthinkable speed. Before the third microsecond was passed, Atkins was crouching behind Phaethon’s chair, trying to put Phaethon’ s body between himself and the concentrated firepower from the mirrors. The Silent One had lost about half his spare bodies in the same moment of time, due to Atkins’s firepower.

  The captain’s chair and the surrounding tables began to burn. Phaethon, trapped in his motionless armor, began to fall.

  In the third microsecond, the Silent One used his control over the drive to send the Phoenix Exultant careening. The deck seemed to wobble; gravity jarred more heavily and lightly.

  Ballistic projectiles radiating from every surface and pore of Atkins’s black armor went astray; smart projectiles were confused by the air, which, at this moment, had turned incandescent and opaque by the energies released long ago, during the outset of the battle in the last microsecond.

  There followed a slow period of battle, lasting over several microseconds, a long-drawn-out campaign. The Silent One, in his many bodies, was beaming his brain information from point to point around the room, and propelling sections of his exploding blue-white flesh back and forth across the chamber, maneuvering. Meanwhile, Atkins, blinded by the opaque air, and unable to drive clear signals from one side of the chamber to another, had his tiny bullets and his supersonic nanoweapons swimming through the incandescent murk, like submarines hunting for enemies in the blind sea.

  Phaethon was no tactician, but it looked to him as if this period of hunt-and-seek were clearly in Atkins’s favor. More of the blue-white Neptunian substance was burning.

  The end of the battle came suddenly. A signal reached Phaethon’s armor. He had no control over his limbs. His armor projected a variety of destructive forces, throwing fragments of his captain’s chair in each direction, and adding to the general waste heat in the chamber.

  His gauntlets grabbed the noetic unit, the unit through which his armor was being controlled, and hugged it to his chest. His mass drivers propelled him sideways and down on his face. He smashed through the status table on his right, and fell into a puddle of blue Neptunian nanomaterial, leaving Atkins unprotected. Many of Atkins’s weapons, sensing a concentration of brain information beneath Phaethon, fired harmlessly into Phaethon’s backplates, but could not wound the puddle beneath him. In that same split instant of time, the Silent One released his control over Phaethon’s deadman switch.

  The pain in Phaethon’s body automatically triggered the weapon program he had already set up. It was as if the mirrors brought the cores of several suns into the room.

  The thought boxes, the bridge crew, and the pressure curtains were wiped away. The deck was polished clean.

  For a long, very long second, concentric bubbles of pseudo-matter appeared around Atkins, additional armor; and he lived even as everything around him was destroyed.

  But something strange seemed to twist or distort the space where the pseudo-matter was focused; the pseudo-matter, and all of Atkins’s pseudo-material weapons, vanished as their fields collapsed.

  During that same long-drawn-out moment, even as he was dying, Atkins drew his ceremonial katana from his belt and, with a cry, launched himself forward in a perfectly executed lunge. He drove the point of the weapon between Phaethon’s invulnerable armor and the deck. The sharp edge scraped through Neptunian neural matter, which parted like water and reformed around it. Phaethon’s armor moved slightly, slapping an arm down to pin the sword in place, before Atkins could slash again.

  The energy from the mirrors peaked. The deck boiled.

  Without a cry or call, Atkins vanished in a white ball of incandescent fire. No fragment was left.

  Phaethon, in his armor, was safe. Atkins’s sword, he could feel beneath him, was safe, the only memento to a futile death. The noetic unit, the thing that allowed the Silent One to control his armor, beneath his chest, still covered, was safe.

  And he could also feel, beneath him, the Silent One, stirring. Also safe.

  5

  THE DEFEAT

  1.

  Like gentle snow, a nanotechnological substance coating the surface of the dome above began to drip into the superheated plasma that once had been air. The “snow” bonded atom to atom, dampening molecular heat motions and forming exothermic compounds. As the cloud filtered downward, softly, silently, the plasma at the top of the dome began to cool and turn transparent. Phaethon had been turned to lie on his back; his armor, once so loyal to him, now formed a skintight prison. He lay in the surviving puddle of Xenophon. He watched without interest as falling snowlike crystals drifted down across his upturned faceplate. The blackened ruins to each side of him were slowly covered with soft white layers.

  The air cleared and the far sides of the dome grew visible.

  The bridge was not totally devastated: around the far circumference, certain of the taller balconies had survived the discharges. The pressure curtains had been engineered, when under catastrophic overpressure, to collapse into energy-inert shells guarding the far walls. Those shells enjoyed a temporary, unstable existence, but survived long enough (several measurable parts of a second) to protect a handful of the bridge mannequins (including Sloppy Rufus, first dog on Mars), some of the more important navigational hierarchy controls, as well as a mass of blue Neptunian body material, undamaged.

  That mass, in reaction to some signal issuing from the body on which Phaethon lay, now rolled heavily off the balcony, dripped from one shattered bank of thought boxes to the next, and began to crawl, drop by drop, across the burnt floor toward him. Xenophon was collecting himself.

  Phaethon also was not totally devastated. But he felt not unlike his handiwork: broken and blasted at the center, with just a fringe of working thoughts circling the aching emptiness.

  Nor was it Atkins he was mourning. The death of that brave man, yes, he regretted: but he knew another copy of Atkins (missing these present events) would be awake back on Earth. This version, the son, so to speak, of Atkins, had died in fire and pain, but such a death as that Atkins, a soldier to the last, would not have flinched from.

  No, it was the death of Diomedes whom Phaethon mourned. His Neptunian friend, trapped inside the flesh of Xenophon, had perished in that first salvo. Being Neptunian, and therefore poor, Diomedes doubtless lacked any noumenal copies of himself. Any copies that might have once existed no doubt had been consumed by Xenophon when he maneuvered to take legal title to the Phoenix Exultant, so that no second claimant would exist.

  Diomedes was dead. Phaethon, in his heart, vowed bloody revenge. He wou
ld kill Xenophon, or the Silent One, or Ao Varmatyr, or whatever this unnamed being was calling itself.

  So his thoughts circled, again and again: but his thoughts never dared touch the blackened center of his pain, the aching emptiness that once had been at his heart. . . .

  Until the hateful voice of Xenophon came once more into his helmet: “Your core belief, your childlike faith in the intelligence and wisdom of your Sophotechs, that is what is at the core of all your sorrow. You have told yourself, again and again, that you understood the Sophotechs were not gods; you told yourself that you knew they had limitations, didn’t you? But now you wonder why they, in all their alleged brilliance, did not save you, and did not save your ship. You had faith in your machines; but they failed. You had faith in Atkins; he has failed. He made the crucial tactical error of incarnating himself inside of a material body.

  “And you also had faith in yourself, your own visionary dream, your own high purpose, your own righteousness and noble resolve. All has failed. Do not bother to deny it, and do not attempt, even in your own mind, to refuse the truth of what I say. We both know that I can see in your mind that it is true.”

  More to distract himself than anything else, more to shut out that hateful voice than because of any real purpose, Phaethon attempted to reset his sense filter, to see how much control he had over it.

  Multiple visual channels and analysis routines were still standing by. Xenophon either could not or did not care to shut those off from him. Phaethon could detect the brain-actions in the Neptunian body he was lying atop; he could see the communication pulses flickering back and forth between that body and the new, larger mass approaching slowly across the steaming, snow-covered slabs of cracked deck.